It’s a voluntary program launched during a Republican administration, endorsed by manufacturers and well-recognized by U.S. consumers, who have saved an estimated $500 billion over the past 33 years guided by its familiar blue label.

But President Donald Trump’s administration has decided the Energy Star program has got to go.

CNN and The Washington Post first reported the plan to eliminate the program that certifies the most energy-efficient appliances and buildings with the Energy Star label. Knowledgeable sources have confirmed to Inside Climate News that Environmental Protection Agency staffers learned the details at an internal meeting earlier this week.

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A starry sky can be stunning—even inside a hospital emergency room.

But instead of celestial bodies sparkling in the night, doctors in South Korea were gazing at bright brain lesions punctuating a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan. The resulting pattern, called a "starry sky," meant that their 57-year-old patient had a dangerous form of tuberculosis. The doctors report the case in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The man had previously been treated for the infection in his lungs but came into the hospital's emergency department after two weeks of unexplained headaches, neck pain, and tingling in his right hand. The MRI and Computed-Tomography (CT) scans clearly revealed the problem: rare nodules and lesions, called tuberculomas, speckling his lungs and central nervous system, including both cerebral hemispheres, the basal ganglia deep inside the brain, the cerebellum at the back of the brain, the brain stem, and the upper spinal cord.

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On Thursday, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University unveiled LegoGPT, an AI model that creates physically stable Lego structures from text prompts. The new system not only designs Lego models that match text descriptions (prompts) but also ensures they can be built brick by brick in the real world, either by hand or with robotic assistance.

"To achieve this, we construct a large-scale, physically stable dataset of LEGO designs, along with their associated captions," the researchers wrote in their paper, which was posted on arXiv, "and train an autoregressive large language model to predict the next brick to add via next-token prediction."

This trained model generates Lego designs that match text prompts like "a streamlined, elongated vessel" or "a classic-style car with a prominent front grille." The resulting designs are simple, using just a few brick types to create primitive shapes—but they stand up. As one Ars Technica staffer joked this morning upon seeing the research, "It builds Lego like it's 1974 ."

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Isar Aerospace, a German startup founded seven years ago, is positioned to become the first in a new generation of European launch companies to reach orbit with a privately funded rocket.

The company announced Friday that the first stage of its Spectrum rocket recently completed a 30-second test-firing on a launch pad in the northernmost reaches of mainland Europe. The nine-engine booster ignited on a launch pad at Andøya Spaceport in Norway on February 14.

The milestone follows a similar test-firing of the Spectrum rocket's second stage last year. With these two accomplishments, Isar Aerospace says its launch vehicle is qualified for flight.

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An ongoing measles outbreak that began in one of Texas' least vaccinated counties has mushroomed to 90 cases across a cluster of seven counties in the state, according to an update by the Texas Department of State Health Services on Friday .

The outbreak may have also spread across the border to New Mexico, where nine cases have been reported. In an email to Ars, Robert Nott, the communications director for the New Mexico Department of Health, said that as of today, the department has not confirmed a connection between the nine cases and any of the confirmed cases in Texas.

However, all nine of the cases are in Lea County, New Mexico, which sits at the border with Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the outbreak. Of Texas' 90 cases, 57 are in Gaines, which has a vaccination rate among kindergarteners of just 82 percent this school year. The lack of a clear connection between the Texas and New Mexico cases may be yet more worrying because it suggests undetected community spread and a heightened risk of transmission in Lea, the health department noted in an alert last week .

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You might suspect that a one-line bill about Bigfoot that bears the number "666" is a joke, but AB-666 is apparently a serious offering from California Assemblymember Chris Rogers . Rogers represents a California district known for its Bigfoot sightings (or "sightings," depending on your persuasion—many of these have been faked ), and he wants to make Bigfoot the "official cryptid" of the state.

His bill notes that California already has many official symbols , including the golden poppy (official flower), the California redwood (official tree), the word "Eureka" (official motto), the red-legged frog (official amphibian), the grizzly bear (official animal), swing dancing (official dance), and the saber-toothed cat (official fossil). The state has so many of these that there are separate categories for freshwater fish (golden trout) and marine fish (garibaldi). So why not, Rogers wants to know, "designate Bigfoot as the official state cryptid"?

That's... pretty much the bill, which was introduced this week and already has Bigfoot advocates excited. SFGate talked to Matt Moneymaker , who it describes as "a longtime Bigfoot researcher and former star of the Animal Planet series Finding Bigfoot ," about the bill. Moneymaker loves it, noting that he has personally “had a face-to-face encounter one time, after which I was absolutely sure they existed because I had one about 20 feet in front of me, growling at me.”

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More than a year’s worth of internal communications from one of the world’s most active ransomware syndicates have been published online in a leak that exposes tactics, trade secrets, and internal rifts of its members.

The communications come in the form of logs of more than 200,000 messages members of Black Basta sent to each other over the Matrix chat platform from September 2023 to September 2024, researchers said. The person who published the messages said the move was in retaliation for Black Basta targeting Russian banks. The leaker's identity is unknown; it’s also unclear if the person responsible was an insider or someone outside the group who somehow gained access to the confidential logs.

How to be your own worst enemy

Last year, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Black Basta had targeted 12 of the 16 US critical infrastructure sectors in attacks mounted on 500 organizations around the world. One notable attack targeted Ascention , a St. Louis-based health care system with 140 hospitals in 19 states. Other victims include Hyundai Europe, UK-based outsourcing firm Capita, the Chilean Government Customs Agency, and UK utility company Southern Water. The native Russian-speaking group has been active since at least 2022.

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As the owner of a 3-year-old laptop, I feel the finite lifespan of lithium batteries acutely. It's still a great machine, but the cost of a battery replacement would take me a significant way down the path of upgrading to a newer, even greater machine. If only there were some way to just plug it in overnight and come back to a rejuvenated battery.

While that sounds like science fiction, a team of Chinese researchers has identified a chemical that can deliver fresh lithium to well-used batteries, extending their life. Unfortunately, getting it to work requires that the battery has been constructed with this refresh in mind. Plus it hasn't been tested with the sort of lithium chemistry that is commonly used in consumer electronics.

Finding the right chemistry

The degradation of battery performance is largely a matter of its key components gradually dropping out of use within the battery. Through repeated cyclings, bits of electrodes fragment and lose contact with the conductors that collect current, while lithium can end up in electrically isolated complexes. There's no obvious way to re-mobilize these lost materials, so the battery's capacity drops. Eventually, the only way to get more capacity is to recycle the internals into a completely new battery.

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On Wednesday, Clone Robotics released video footage of its Protoclone humanoid robot, a full-body machine that uses synthetic muscles to create unsettlingly human-like movements. In the video, the robot hangs suspended from the ceiling as its limbs twitch and kick, marking what the company claims is a step toward its goal of creating household-helper robots.

Atherton, California-based Clone Robotics designed the Protoclone with a polymer skeleton that replicates 206 human bones. The company built the robot with the hopes that it will one day be able to operate human tools and perform tasks like doing laundry, washing dishes, and preparing basic meals.

The Protoclone reportedly contains over 1,000 artificial muscles built with the company's "Myofiber" technology, which builds on the McKibbin pneumatic muscle concept. These muscles work through mesh tubes containing balloons that contract when filled with hydraulic fluid, mimicking human muscle function. A 500-watt electric pump serves as the robot's "heart," pushing fluid at 40 standard liters per minute.

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